- It’s a commercial product, what else could you expect?
Should be a full stop with “profit”. All the shitty things that go with companies chasing it.
One reason: It’s not FOSS, and because of that, it’s not protected from the Capitalist profit motive that’s always pushing the creators/owners towards enshitification.
The same forces act upon FOSS too, but the difference is that FOSS has structural immunity built into it. If the software enshitifies, it can be forked and maintained by a community that values software freedom.
We’ve seen it happen time and again. Terraform, CentOS, RHEL, The Xen Hypervisor, etc. When companies try to take freedom away from FOSS, they fail, because their users and maintainers are empowered by FOSS licenses (especially restrictive ones like the GPL) and can fight back.
With proprietary software, the users are powerless, only the owners have control.
Don’t trust promises, good intentions, or corporate slogans. Trust free software and the open ecosystems they thrive in.
PS, Jellyfin is amazing ❤️
I just need Jellyfin to fix their subtitles issues on Apple TV and I’ll be all set. Swiftfin needs some work yet, though I’m told the fix is in the pipeline for release soon^™ (probably by Q1 next year?).
If they were going to get enshittified, they should’ve been smarter about it to gradually introduce lock-in. The switching cost of going to Jellyfin is almost zero. Did it in an afternoon about a year ago. Ya done goofed, Plex
I’m going to call it like I saw it, a very long time ago.
<rant>
You have a product that is basically purpose built to make data hoarding and piracy practical, yet it requires a login with a central service. I don’t care what justification anyone thinks makes that worthwhile or even a good compromise. Signaling to any corporate entity that you’re in possession of such a thing is a bad idea to begin with. They shouldn’t even know you exist. That information, along with anything else you do with the product is compromising to you and can be sold for money if aggregated with everyone else’s data.
If you find this rant out of place in our modern world, I’d like to point to the concept of shifting baselines. This didn’t used to be normal and nothing short of greed continues the behavior. The technology before this ran/runs without anyone knowing. Consider VLC, or XBMC.
Jellyfin is a complete replacement for Plex
I never felt comfortable with Plex, glad I’ve got JellyFin.
FYI, they never capitalise like that. It’s always Jellyfin, not JellyFin. They actually have a policy detailing it.
Indeed. Seems every week Plex takes some action to enshitify their service more and more.
I prefer open source, but if I’m buying proprietary software, let’s do it fairly and sustainably. Don’t charge me a 1-time fee and then enshittify what I bought because your business model isn’t working. On the other hand, don’t charge me multiple times for the same software with a subscription. The most fair arrangement to both of us is to sell perpetual licenses for a specific version and then charge me for major updates. If your newer versions introduce massive improvements, then I might give you more money. It’s also fair to do free upgrades for a period of time and then charge for major upgrades. Finally, don’t force me to use your software always online and if you must have an activation process, provide a way to activate from a different machine by uploading an activation file or whatever.
Capitalism.
Yeah, only one reason. It’s always capitalism.
Enshitification has entered the chat
Not in this case. “Getting shitty” and “enshittification” are different.
Clients suck on non plex
The thing it replaced… XBMC? O_o
Xbmc was renamed Kodi and it’s still revenant. It has a totally different use case than Plex or jellyfin and there’s plugins for both.
Did you mean to type ‘relevant’ or are you suggesting it’s a zombie project?
Meh, I went into plex settings on the server and just turned off all the bloat. Its all on one page. Not a big deal.
I went into no settings on Jellyfin and everything stayed sane and the same.
Sure, but you also don’t have the option to use those features because they don’t exist in jellyfin.
In my plex instance, I have discover enabled, and enabled all the streaming services so that discover is populated with all the movies and shows available. Then I have an automation setup so I can search in discover for a movie, and add it to my watchlist, and my automation will automatically download that movie and add it to my library.
I can do it right from my couch, and its WAF approved. Using those bloat features against them, in a way.
But, its just as easy to turn those all off if one doesn’t want to utilize them. I’d be annoyed if they forced them on permanently but that’s not what plex does, but they sure get a lot of hate for just having those features.
That’s a feature I wouldnt want in mine for example.
I just want my stuff and only mine.But hey: Everyones gotta choose their own. And if youre happy, who am I to judge.
Sure, so you open settings and simply disable those extras. Then you have a nice clean ui with only your libraries. It even cleans up the app when disabled so there’s only home and libraries tabs. Nothing more.
I think many people aren’t aware all the extras have disable options in plex. Essentially turning it back into plex from years ago.
IMO: Not the point.
Essentially the same discussion here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/23054418
Sure, you could do it by turning 5 switches and 2 knobs but mine just does what I tell it to.
(And I don’t have to pay for remote access or HWA)Great, now how do you deal with 30 remote streamers when your IP changes? Do you have tobsetup extra knobs just to get remote streaming to work? Are your apps refined or still buggy?
I’d personally rather deal with 5 options to turn off in settings than deal with all those extra steps and drawbacks. You really seem to have a huge hate bone for plex, so enjoy your choice, and move on.
Since I have a domain, I use DynDNS.
I needed it anyway so why not use it also there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
whoa, you mean you don’t want ads?? what is happening?!
Where do you get ads from on plex!?
i count as all the streaming shit they try to push as ads.
What about the limits on remote streaming unless you pay?
I purchased a lifetime sub when it was on sale
Same, I’ve paid once, 12 years ago, and imo it was worth supporting them.
Yeah, Plex wins there - lifetime subs for Jellyfin never seem to be on sale.
Goodness, how am I supposed to store and stream more entertainment than I could watch in a lifetime now?
I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this. But no, it’s just “4 ways in which Plex now sucks” which we all know already.
Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?
Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?
We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.
Plex took a significant degree of other people’s money, to the tune of over 40 million dollars. The people who gave said money were not kickstarter funders, donators, subscribers, etc but investors, who have an expectation that plex will move the company in a direction that makes them profitable enough to not only repay the 40+ million investment, but to then earn profits for a lengthy period (possibly in perpetuity) as they are stakeholders. This is the same thing that happened to Reddit (though Reddits scale and timeline was FAR more vast), openai, Google, literally every company ever basically. Plex now has an obligation to not just continue development but to continue it in a way that maximizes growth and revenue, even if that is anti consumer.
Jellyfin on the other hand has language on their contributions page that almost discourages financial support. This is because the only financial support they accept is donations, which are clearly explained are to support the free software and give no ownership stake. The software does not generate profit and donation does not equate to any kind of investment, other than supporting continued development. Expecting any kind of return on your part (again, other than the project continuing to move forward) is foolish. Lemmy is similar, as are many other FOSS projects. Jellyfin can remain ideologically stable to its goals, and because it is free if its users feel the lead developers are straying from this they can fork it and make “new ideologically pure jellyfin” (see xmbc to plex to emby to jellyfin, or lemmys 938 forks, many of which are tweaks and some of which are because people got beef with the main devs)
Further to this, I heard Cory Doctorow talk about open source licensing being a Ulysses Pact. Basically Ulysses wanted to hear the sirens song. Normally, hearing it would drive you mad and you would wreck upon the rocks. Ulysses ordered his men to bind their ears with wax so they would not be affected by the sirens song. He also ordered them to tie him to the mast.
In the moment, he knew he would not be strong enough to resist the sirens song and because he was bound to the mast, he could not jump overboard. In the same way, people that use open source licenses on their projects are binding themselves to the open source license so that if a large temptation was to present itself (such as investors wanting to give them life changing money in exchange for mistreating their customers) they are already bound by that license and cannot break that bond.
Or they’ll do what plex did. Reminder that plex started life as a fork of xbmc/kodi for macos. When their fork showed some popularity they shifted development to various names (plex home theater). While this still contained a lot of GPL code they then spent a good deal of dev time rewriting said code to be fully closed source.
This is less discussed but also why plex is one of the most insidious and disgusting pieces of unethical software one can use. The writing is on the wall and the company is led by scumbags, sure, but people don’t talk as much about how they forked xbmc, built a huge product based on everything learned from it, and then closed everything off once they did the minimum required cover your ass moves.
What they did is legal but is it ethical? If they did it to a company like apple or Microsoft they’d get sued, that’s for damn sure. And ethically speaking I would say it’s really fucked to take all this stuff from the community: architecture, ideas, ui/ux, approaches to plugin design, data modeling, etc and build a whole company off of it, then basically give nothing back. They closed it off so they could get their bag, fuck the community that taught them so much and helped build their MVP.
What you describe is similar to the creation of jellyfin from emby though; where embys dev team suddenly decided to close source the GPL server code (a violation) and add monetization. the community rejected this, and forked the last version prior to the nonsense into what is now jellyfin.
Plex is a private company…
I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this.
- Greed… do you really need 3 more?
Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?
Plex is a private company wanting money… Jellyfin is a voluteer-drive effort
Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?
Enshitification happens to privately develop products due to <checks notes> greed… Jellyfin is not a private company pushing a product for profit
We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.
Back to “greed”
plus jellyfin is open source. if they start enshittifying, people can just fork it. That will keep them in line. Look what happened with emby. They’ve been sent to oblivion and no one even talks about them anymore.
As predicted, a one-dimensional answer.
Let’s say they want more money: they do have a healthy software subscriptions business. How can they get more by becoming the world’s tiniest streaming service? And won’t that cannibalize their subscriptions business as the experience gets shittier and shittier?
Some actual “whys” within this would be things like (made up, but for example)
-
the subscriptions business is dying - less than 1% of users ever buy a pass and efforts to increase that failed for (another reason here)
-
streaming services are dumping cash into viewer acquisition because a war is on for dominance in that space and Pled is capitalizing on that
-
Plex has high overlap with gamers and are making good money on midroll gaming ads during these streams
-
Plex has legal concerns about facilitating piracy - this is the real reason why sync is shit and they killed watch together. They are desperately trying to pivot out of their old business before they get sued - OR all this streaming nonsense gives them a kind of fig leaf over that somehow
See, issues can be complex and interesting. Just calling them greedy is neither. How is this the greedy play, even?
Nobody outside Plex’s finance department is going to have what you’re looking for if those examples are anything to go by.
What it comes down to is they have $130M that investors are going to want back and all the decisions they’re making now are aimed at doing so. That doesn’t mean any of those decisions are good or are going to work. It didn’t even mean they won’t backfire and have the opposite effect.
Anyone who has knowledge of or works in any areas adjacent to any of these could provide some kind of insight. Fuck me for wanting some grownup conversation about why businesses do the things they do, instead of a circle jerk of hating on mustache-twirling villains.
-
Here you can see, what they do with the money:
https://opencollective.com/jellyfin
There’s only one reason, money.
But it’s at least four $1.
Jellyfin is great :D
Does jellyfin have an easy way for remote streaming? I have a couple dozen people on my Plex server, most not very tech savvy, so setting up tailscale and running remote that way isn’t an option. I have a Plex pass so I haven’t been screwed by Plex yet, so I’m not rushing to get out, but I could see myself running both.
Yes-ish, it’s harder for you than the users. But you will have to secure a URL and they will have to remember that URL. Also there’s some security issues with some unsecured endpoints on Jellyfin. That said I have mine out there exposed to the net and am comfortable enough with it.
I already have to expose my Plex Media Server with a Tailscsle funnel (for IPv4 only) for IPv6 I use my Synology NAS reverse proxy which can be accessed globally.
I have been maining this setup for years now that I forgot if I can access my PMS outside without either those solutions lol (I am GGNATED but IPv6 works fine as stated).
The main thing here is that I don’t need my users to do anything, they just open the app and access it, no need to remember IPs/URLs or install VPNs to my server… Is that possible with Jellyfin as well?
Yes you can do the same thing for Jellyfin. I use Synology ddns and setup subdomain in reverse proxy to jellyfin port. For tailscale, I previously use this but needs to add the jellyfin port after the tailscale IP.
No, there’s not centralized host server to connect your users with your server. They need a fixed IP or URL to access your server from outside your network.
So how do they access from, let’s say a Smart TV/Android TV device?
Jellyfin apps ask you for three things in order to login: URL, username, password.
Thanks, that clears everything up for me…
Now if you could set that URL from the server itself and not the client apps… Certainly I don’t think that’s an impossible task.
I have mine behind a caddy reverse proxy that forces https. I think that handles most sniffing concerns
You could just get a domain and set up a reverse proxy. Or use Cloudflare tunnels.
All possible, but currently I have lifetime Plex pass and just need to share with people I want to share with. No extra config. Once Jellyfin can do that or something similar, I’ll look at jumping ship. Until then, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Once Jellyfin can do that or something similar
Once Jellyfin does that then it’ll be time to look at jumping ship to something else, because that’ll be the indication that Jellyfin is going down the same road as Plex.
Fair enough. I doubt Jellyfin will ever offer something like that. Its designed to be completely self hosted and not rely on a central server, which I dont see changing.
The first one, yes. That’s what I do. But IIRC hosting media via cloudflare tunnels goes against the TOC and they reserve the right to ban users over it
They changed their TOC a while ago, the only thing they have in there now is boiler plate stuff about not hosting pirated content.
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/terms/
You agree not to, and not to allow third parties to use the Services to ... post, transmit, store or link to any files, materials, data, text, audio, video, images or other content that infringe on any person’s intellectual property rights or that are otherwise unlawful;I just set up a cache rule to ignore my jellyfin subdomain and they won’t ever care about me and my half dozen users.
Oh that’s good news! I really only use it for myself, so that sounds like I can stream my music without worrying
no, tailscale is still the easiest option.
Bummer… unfortunately, that’s a deal breaker for me to completely drop Plex. Maybe someday.
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Can you fly out to my MIL every time her router breaks and fix it for her?
Edit: holy shit, your edits are insane
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I swear every single Plex related thread has the same Jellyfin fanatics coming in. Same energy as “my MIL has trouble with her computer” “just install Linux bro!” comments.
Still better than the army of Plex fanboys that all claim to have dozens of senior citizens streaming from their Plex server.
Yeah that’s totally how it works. 👍
e: lots of 🤡 in here
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So I don’t get it, I have mine up with a domain without tsilscale… The clients are quite happy wherever. I don’t even see that much “crawling” traffic that goes to the domain, most just hit the server by ip and get a static 401 page that the “default” site is hard coded to give out.
At some point, somewhere on the internet, someone authoritatively claimed that tailscale is the one and only acceptable solution to getting your jellyfin server outside your LAN and it just kind of took root. nginx has worked perfectly fine for me.
I’m so confused why so many people think a VPN is the best solution. It’s easy to implement, but hardly optimal, and certainly not the only solution
I set mine up with HAProxy for TLS offloading and ACME for the server cert. Restrict your access to just your country/region by GeoIP and you are pretty good to go.
I moved away from plex as well. I do have remote access but had to set up Tailscale on the accounts that access it. It’s a bit of a hassle initially but works well.
I’d love Jellyfin if not for their incredibly infuriating seek behaviour. Why do I have to press play to start the video again?
In case this helps, for me when I use it on Android TV with said TV’s remote, the arrow buttons on the direction pad for anything require pressing play/OK button after. But if I use the fast forward buttons, it does seek and then just keeps playing.
For me I just want a fast forward button. They have something they call fast forward, but it seeks instead.
Except the sync / group watch feature is pretty broken which makes me sad
Agreed! I stayed with Plex for a long time because Jellyfin had a rough time with live TV (antenna) and I already had a PlexPass because of a sale a long time ago. Now Plex is only still running because I love Plexamp.
Dude, yeah. Plexamp had me keeping my server up far longer than I should have.
I struggled to find a decent plexamp replacement and ended up using symphonium, if you’re looking for any suggestions. Its been working out pretty well with jellyfin.
Symphonium is awesome. Still looking for a nice desktop alternative to Plexamp, which I can’t stand for its interface on desktop.
The way you switch between two servers you own is more than inconvenient; it’s what keeps Plex in my life.I wish things would change because everything else is better.
Thats how I describe Jellyfin, it works fine, its just inconvenient to use.
That’s why I use Emby. Paid for lifetime within a day of switch from Plex (which I also have has lifetime for like a decade) because it has a ton of plugins that have been useful and has a cloud server switch function.
Just to think of replacing the mount points in the docker container from Plex to Jellyfin (in order for it to read my Riven and Decypharr symlinks) scares me… Mostly because after I finish a docker project my mind seems to go blank lol.
At least they still kinda honour the Plex Pass lifetime users…
At least they still kinda honour the Plex Pass lifetime users…
for now.
Yeah I know, but Jellyfin is gonna be around when they stop doing this… I can hold a little longer 😁
No, it’s not.
No shot you linked to fucking sora
For the love, as a Plex alternative, they don’t even have a native app on all major tv stores. It should be a P1 feature. I would throw money at them if they get Apple TV support. Right now, there are no functional apps running on the latest Apple TV OS.
For the love, as a Plex alternative, they don’t even have a native app on all major tv stores. It should be a P1 feature.
Are you really bitching this hard about a completely free and open source project?
It’s not technology or finances that kill most FOSS projects and burn out the devs. It’s this kind of shitty entitled unappreciative demanding attitude from users.
As others have pointed out, there are fully functional and good quality frontends available, such as Swiftfin.
I maintain open source projects too, and I fully understand the burnout, the pressure from supporters and such. What I was saying is they can do better from a project management perspective. Otherwise I love their work :3
Swiftfin is buggy atm, like my other comment.
I maintain open source projects too, and I fully understand the burnout, the pressure from supporters and such.
Then you should know better than most that your wording and approach matters.
I haven’t used apple tv in a few years, but like, swiftfin worked just fine for me??
Swiftfin?
For me the audio is desynced and subtitles are completely broken. :(
Oh weird. I would guess a transcoding issue, maybe double check those settings to make sure you have the right config for your hardware.
Theres also Infuse, its a video player that supports jellyfin, but I think some features are behind a premium purchase.
Yeah. The entire jellyfin support is behind subscription.
I believe Infuse has Jellyfin support on Apple TV. But they want like £100 for a lifetime license or £2 a month / £13 a year.
Yeaaaaaaaah, I mean it’s a good app, but I don’t know if it justifies a $100 license.
Stopped using Plex and moved to jellyfin around 12 months ago and have never looked back
I have both but Jellyfin is not good with duplicates. Having several versions of movies in different languages just puts multiple copies of the movies in Jellyfin, with no distinction between them until you click into the details. Plex does this well with “Play version”.
But Plex is worse for other reasons, on my LG TV. It’s painfully slow and doesn’t play the correct audio track that I select.
Plex does this well with “Play version”.
It does it even better with “editions” support, at least for movies.
Yeah that’s good too, but ultimately for a different purpose. Still great. Jellyfin have that?
The problem I have with “play version” is that you can’t really control which version is the default. Also it’s kind of hidden in the menu. And when you do select the version it just shows you the resolution (which is useless if you have two versions with the same resolution but different languages).
Unless some is already familiar with plex, they probably won’t find your different language version. But a custom “different language” edition of the movie will show up right below the extras.
Jellyfin have that?
No idea.
Unless some is already familiar with plex, they probably won’t find your different language version.
I don’t have this issue, but I agree it could be easier to see which version you are playing. I think it’s supposed to be very different quality versions, so one would be like 4K, then 1080p, then maybe 720p. But when you have one English 4K and one Nordic 4K, is a 50-50 guessing game. It’s easy to switch once you start playing though.
Still better than Jellyfin though, in this particular regard.
An mkv with multiple audio tracks would save you some storage space.
Yes, however sometimes it’s easier to manage language and subtitles in a single file if space is not an issue and you often are wanting a different version. Might also have pre-burned subtitles, for which you’ll need a separate video stream anyway.
This too, yes. 🎯
Not if I want/need to seed both versions. Then it’s a third version I need to keep on disk for a few weeks, instead of just two. Believe me, I’ve had this idea too, and have remuxed several movies to save space. 👍
Looking back at this thread. Jellyfin does let you select both versions and combine them into one. Then you can keep seeding to your heart’s content.
I don’t use that feature often, but have a couple movies that use it.
That’s simpler and better (nondestructive) than renaming files, for sure. Still an extra step I need to take vs not having to do so.
Fair enough, I’m mostly ripping my own discs so being a good torrent citizen isn’t always top of mind.
🫡🏴☠️
Haven’t really tried it but they have support for dupes.
You just need to name them correctly (too lazy to link the docs. Just look up versions in media library)That’s what I mean. You have to rename them. Plex handles this automatically, with the same shared library. I wish Jellyfin was better at this.
Jellyfin goes by file name, Plex goes by identified movie/show. Much better.
Welll…They state in their docs how it should be.
If you deviate from it, that’s on you.And yes it’d be nice if they did it automagically but we can’t have everything and I don’t expect it from them honestly as that is really a very niche requirement considering it already works.
If you deviate from it, that’s on you.
I don’t understand why we need to “pin it” on someone?
It just works differently, in a way that requires more hands-on work, as opposed to no hands-on work. So it’s objectively worse. That’s “on me”?
It being in the docs is irrelevant in this context. It could’ve been there or not. But the fact that I need to do extra work as opposed to not makes Plex more comfortable in this regard, and I don’t see how that’s up for debate.
If Jellyfin had done it’s duplication check on identified movie IDs instead of filesystem names, we would be in a different situation. But they don’t, and here we are.
I’m not ragging on Jellyfin, I’m just pointing out facts. Not even an opinion piece.
It just works differently, in a way that requires more hands-on work
That’s correct.
But you chose to ignore the instructions because you are used to a different way of doing it and them you get duplicate entries.
That’s it (shrug).Why are still trying to blame this on the user, lol?
If the user has to do more work for the same result, it’s a worse system. Period.
That’s it. 🤷♂️
To go into more detail:
How did I choose to ignore instructions when I didn’t read them in the first place? Neither system’s installation instructions has this in it. You’d have to deep dive when you realize it doesn’t work for one of them. Namely Jellyfin.
“Choosing” to ignore it is also a matter of definition. If I rename all my shit, I am a) duplicating lots of downloads on my system because I need to keep the original in order to seed, or b) not able to seed and lose my ability to gain more content in the first place.
Sometimes people’s circumstances are different from yours, my friend.
I understand Jellyfin is better in so many other aspects, I agree with that, but do not defend one single feature which works objectively worse and pin it on the user. Don’t be that person.
Same brother
